AuthorTopic: Day Night Cycles in Pixel Art (Read 450 times)

How would one go about creating day night cycles for pixel art? After creating a mockup of a scene for example, how can I implement a shader or a filter to accurately depict how the scene would look at nighttime?

It really depends on how you define "day" and "night". If they're simple palette swaps, then you can use a palette-changing shader. It's even possible to create effects like lights coming on with palette swapping, if you're clever with the initial palette. If the light type and direction changes, then you would probably need to create that stuff separately. If you want a smooth day-night transition with shifting light sources, that complicates things further.

There's no automatic way, because different colours and materials react to the different lighting differently, and you would need to account for the way you use the colours. In addition, you'd want all of the times to still work compositionally and have adequate contrast, etc. You'd need to create at two palettes (night, day, and ideally also dawn/dusk because it looks weird without them) by hand and blend between them to create the gradual transitions.

You could shift all the hues towards blue, saturate them, and darken them, but this'll give you a much worse result than doing it by hand.